So at first I thought “put nothing in script modules” because they’re pretty pointless, right? Anything you write will pertain to a step exclusively, so why do you need to share code across steps. Turns out quite a bit of code is shared across steps, particularly checking and validating parameters.

Then, as step templates got more sophisticated they got harder to read, so then I thought “put everything in script modules!” It aided in legibility of the step templates and allowed them to focus mainly on setting up a process and using script modules to execute the function.

There is however an issue to this: script modules are the “magic” of a step template. If you’re not aware that a step template requires a script module, how can you communicate this implicitly? You could mention that a script module is required in a step template, but this is still a manual process that everyone remembers, or even buys into.

There is also another issue: I had to make a change to a step template that required a change to the script module. The step template in question was in heavy use, and so careful planning was required to make sure that the change in the step template and the script module was not a breaking change: basically what I mean is that whereas a step template has to be explicitly updated for a given step in an deployment pipeline, the same cannot be said for a script module. So whatever is the latest version of the script template is what a user gets. And if you make a few changes to the step template in an iterative manner, you have to be sure that if anyone updates the step template then all version have to match one another.

Two of my most recent posts have concerned pre-model scripts; those scripts that need to be run before the dacpac is compared against the production database. These are sometimes necessary. And this necessity is usually because SSDT may not produce a script that is optimal. One such example is an index creation: no index is created “ONLINE”, and this can be a problem if the database being deployed is online during this operation. And can be even worse if the table is particularly large.

In respect to the SSDT team, I can see why this is the case: some versions of SQL have the online index feature, some don’t. So one solution may be to write a pre-model script that will create an index with the online operation included. And while there’s nothing wrong with this, there is an alternative: deployment contributors.

Earlier this year, I wrote a long post about log shipping. One of the key points I mentioned was how slow restoring can be for a read only log shipped database. If going and reading the whole thing is too much effort for you now, I’ll save you the effort (you child of the internet you) and tell you it’s because the database needs to be kept transactionally consistent in between restores when making it available for read-only. It creates a .tuf file (transaction undo file) to keep the progress of all the pages that have uncommitted transactions saved to them. The checking, creation, applying and re-applying of this can take some time where there is a significant amount of uncommitted transactions within a log backup.

Recently someone got in touch with me about one of my earliest posts. I realised I had made a mistake on that post and had updated. But I also realised that the script itself is actually part of a PowerShell module. So wanting to make things as easy as possible, and being the helpful guy that I am, I have altered that example into a script which I am posting here.

It’s worth stressing that the errors that output to the console are fairly generic, and that there is a log file that will contain all the information if there are any errors.

In my previous post, I shared a script that used the Octopus API to create a defect, with the aim of it being added to a TeamCity build and chaining the build to a deploy/test build step in TeamCity: the aim being to raise an Octopus defect if a test fails whilst the deployment to the environment succeeded. You can read more about it here.

What makes this a challenge is that there is no way to have a chained build that runs if, and only if, a build has failed. So as with Octopus you have to use the TeamCity API. In this script I get the the status of the last build that deployed/ran the tests, and if this build succeeded I do nothing. So yes this chained build has to always run post deploy/test phase.

Where it gets interesting though is if the build failed. Here we raise a defect, but not before checking to see if there are any defects raised that are still unresolved, as only one Octopus defect can be unresolved at any one time.

Hello and welcome to yet another “Ronseal” title for a post…. and whilst this may not be something you’ll have to do regularly, searching for values in a query plan may be useful when running unit tests for SQL: you may be using it to confirm that a certain operator is used in the query plan, or whether a seek or scan is used… the possibilities are really endless.

That “CASE” statement stands out quite a bit doesn’t it. Let’s explore why this query needs a CASE expression. Begin by creating a temp table that contains a sample of the data stored in the temp table.

Keep It Pithy: I’ve had to read many CV’s in my time, and nothing is more off putting than a CV that is longer than Milton’s Paradise Lost. Remember, the hiring manager will have a pile of CV’s and perhaps will dedicate all of 5 minutes in deciding who makes the initial shortlist and whose to bin, so help them make a quick decision by keeping your CV short. The optimal length of a CV should be no more than a page, or 2 pages if you have to. But no one is going to care that 20 years ago you worked on a Saturday washing cars. You may have a great job history, but try not to go back too far. And the older the job, the less detail you need to put in. This still gives you a chance to shows something you’re really proud of in an old role without going into too much detail.

Keep it Pertinent: You need to keep in mind that no 2 jobs are the same yet chances are you will apply for these different roles with the same CV. So you need to focus on the profession you’re applying for. If you’re applying for a job that is a DBA, keep that as your focus as you write it. The hiring manager is not going to care if your hobbies are going out with your friends and taking long walks on the beach. Cutting out the fraff like this will also help keep it short. You don’t want your CV to be the next Voynich Manuscript .

Keep it Presentable: So you’ve got to keep it pithy and pertinent, yet you also need to keep it clear. So this is where most people who do keep it short and pertinent may fail in trying to cram everything in. Consider your font type: using something like Calibri over Arial or Verdana. By all means keep the margins narrow, but don’t over do it. Use bullet points as opposed to full sentences. Brevity is the key. If you want to draw the managers attention to something, highlight a word or two in bold. And use spell and grammar check! Despite technologies best efforts, I write with many typos, because I am lazy when it comes to typing. Rather embarrassingly, as a DBA, I still misspell “FROM as “FORM”, yet spell check will not pick this up. So get someone to proof read it. This is different from critiquing your CV: just make sure the sentences make sense and that there’s no daft typos.

Show The Value: the benefits of certain technologies that you know about may not immediately present their benefit to the hiring manager, so you need to demonstrate that you understand the business value of your expertise. Listing technologies shows nothing other than you know how to write a list of technologies. You know how to write PowerShell modules… great. Who cares? You wrote a series of PowerShell modules that transferred backup files over a dodgy FTP connection and would retry any failed transfers so that no one had to log in over the weekend and check the progress of transfers? OK, that sounds much better.

Plan and Prepare: there’s a military adage called the 7 P’s . Mild expletive aside, it’s important to take the time to write your CV and give it the attention it deserves. Your CV is the first impression that hiring managers have of you. If you just bash out some bullet points and don’t put the effort into applying the four points above, your putting out the impression that you aren’t really that serious about looking for a new job, so why should the hiring manager be serious about calling you in for an interview?

2015-07

Edit: MSSISBuild has been updated and moved to GitHub. Read about it here. The rest of this post is still relevant, it’s just where you download the code form that has changed. this has proven to be a popular post, and the software has been downloaded a few times. I will post an update for SQL Server 2016 soon, though I think it is just references in the solution that needs updating.

Today I am pleased to announce the release of MSBuildSsis2012 on Codeplex. But before i get into what it does first, a bit of background:

Back in May, and subsequently a few more times since, I’ve posted about an error I get occasionally in one of our custom tasks that run in our builds. This custom task is a special case: As the SSIS 2012 project extension is dtproj, it cannot be compile using MSBuild. The typical solution would be to use DevEnv In MSBuild. And to automate deployment the solution (that would work for most people) is to use the SSIS Deployment Wizard in silent mode. However, we don’t use the SSIS Deployment Wizard in our automated builds as it does not work in Silent Mode when you have assembly references in the SSIS packages: it destroys those references and the dtsx packages fail whenever they run.

In my previous post I shared some SQL scripts which would give you the number of undistributed commands by publication, by publication and article, and by distribution database. So you can measure undistributed commands at a very high granularity (articles), or at a very low granularity (the entire distribution database.) How granular you go depends entirely on where your pain is: you could of course filter out to only a few articles, or a particular publication.

HOwever, replication is really something that you’re not going to learn through a book. You’re going to learn by working with replication in a real environment. And chances are a real replication environment is going to use more than one publication against groupings of subscribers.
2015-04-29

This is still based on the fact that you can hit the magic number of 1,048,576, or at the very least 102,400, per bulk insert, to create compressed segments. If you cannot, then I still feel that the method of loading into a heap, and then creating the clustered columnstore index, is preferential. This is because if you trickle insert into a CCI, you will end up with a mixture of open/closed delta stores and come compressed segments. You could leave it to the tuple mover to compress these, and you would still be left with some open delta stores. However, as Remus Rusanu points out, this is not recommended. To complete the process quickly, and to remove any open delta stores, you would need to rebuild the partition.

The advantages of using this over the older version include the aforementioned process and checks, but also it means you don’t have to specify cube, measuregroup and the aggregation designs name. The disadvantage to this is that it assumes you want the latest aggregation design applied and processed. Somewhere along the way there will probably be a script which combines all of this nicely!

Throughout October, SQL Relay 2014 is taking place in the UK. If you’re unfamiliar with SQL Relay, it is a series of 1 day events that are run throughout the UK. Each event is a single track (or more in the case of London) conference, with between 50 and 200 attendees and 6-8 hour long talks by SQL Server professionals, MVPs, authors, technical experts etc.

Great! Finally, a Management Pack for SSAS! I don’t know how much people know about Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM), so a brief introduction: SCOM is, according to the Microsoft Marketing Executives:

The second exam I passed is the “Delivering Continuous Value with Visual Studio 2012 Application Lifecycle Management”, which (along with the testing and TFS exams) is necessary for achieving the Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer Certification.

When deploying our Ispacs through my builds, I’ve still been getting the intermittent “timeout” issues I first wrote about back in May, and this has been exacerbated by extra SSIS Projects added to the SSISDB catalog.

Way back in 2008, a post on the blogs.msdn site showed how to create a custom MSBuild task to associate changesets and work items only since the last successful build. Recently I needed to write this custom task myself, but for builds that were “PartiallySuccessful” as well as “Successful”, and was pleased to find such a complete target available. However as it is written for TFS 2008 it won’t work with TFS 2010 onwards. As the blog appears to be inactive now I’ve made the changes and put the code below. Hopefully anyone who needs it for TFS 2010 onwards can use the pingback to get here for the up to date code. The rest of the solution works fine.

Throughout November, SQL Relay R2 2013 is taking place in the UK. This is the 2nd series of events this year. SQL Relay is a series of 1 day events that are run throughout the UK. Each event is a single track (or more in the case of London) conference, with between 50 and 200 attendees and 6-8 hour long talks by SQL Server professionals, MVPs, authors, technical experts etc.

“Good one” I thought to myself. And then I wondered if any of the files that make up the cubes on our SSAS boxes were being scanned or whether they were excluded. We have some big cubes in our system, and by big i mean TB’s worth of cubes, some of them over 700GB. So I fired up the System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection on one of the SSAS boxes, and sure enough, all files were being scanned. But should they? This Microsoft KB article confirmed my suspicions that they can be exempt from scanning: How to choose antivirus software to run on computers that are running SQL Server

Further to my post yesterday about Importing projects in MSBuild, it’s worth having a quick read over the “Order of Evaluation” section to understand further that it is important where you import a project if you wish to set the properties and items of the imported project.(TL;DR -

This week has been the week of the release: We’ve had the Visual Studio 2013 Preview and now the SQL Server 2014 CTP1. And that’s just the ones I’m focusing on! There’s the Windows 8.1 Preview as well as Windows Server 2012 R2. What with all the keynotes from Build and both TechEd’s this month, it is clear that Microsoft have certainly accelerated the release cycle and embraced a cloud-first development model. For me this is most noticeable in Team Foundation Services, the Azure based Source Control solution. Features were turned on regularly before they were released in the three updates we’ve had since the release of TFS 2012 back in August. This is a big change from the Microsoft’s previous strategy of developing for its products hosted on the premises first and then being pushed to them to the cloud afterwards.

At a later date I’ll dig more into features of SQL 2014, as this week my focus has been on Visual Studio 2013, which is out sometime this year, as well as doing my job in real life. The duties of blogging…

Introduction

Continuing with my automated database deployment series, this post touches on the build.publish.xml file that is used to script and publish a SQL Server 2012 project in Visual Studio. This step is necessary as we will need this file in our automated build.
2013-06-12

No WiX Wednesday this week, owing to commitments in real life. Instead, here is something regarding SSIS 2012 Deployment. Enjoy!

As part of our CI and Test Builds we have automated the deployment of two SSIS Projects. One is fairly large and the other one contains only two dtsx packages. Recently we have been getting timeout issues with the deployment of the solutions.

Firstly, let me introduce myself, my name is Gareth (author of Testing The Waterhouse), I’m a Senior QA Engineer and started working in QA the same time as Richard for the same company. I got into QA for similar reasons to Rich, I’d graduated and was finding it hard to get a job so ended up working for a small consultancy firm as a QA analyst.

When Richard got in touch with me a couple of weeks ago about guest blogging on his blog, I wasn’t really sure what to write about, seeing as he used to be a tester, but has moved into the DevOps world. I started reading The Phoenix Project, so I could try and gain an idea of what his new world is like, unfortunately, I’m only half way through, so didn’t really want to write a blog post about that…

Introduction

In Visual Studio 2012, the old Data Dude projects have been replaced by SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT), which encompasses a list of improvements to database development in Visual Studio that was formerly known by the codename “Juneau”. When SSDT was first released there were several issues with compatibility levels, but has improved greatly since the December update.2013-04-19

Last week brentozar.com ran one of their Technology Triage Tuesdays on Compression in SQL Server. The video does not appear to be up yet, however it provided good insight, certainly better than the Technet pages on the same subject. As we have a multi-terabyte data warehouse at work, which is on an Enterprise licensed instance of SQL Server 2012, I’m familiar with the subject of data compression in SQL. Until recently however, another one of our other SQL Servers was on a Standard license. Recently this instance was upgraded to Enterprise, and so I was able to compress the database. Although not as large as our data warehouse, it was well worth considering compressing some of the larger tables.

Based on a previous post about TFS Build Server Best Practices,I thought I’d share the stack I install and a few of the steps that I go through to get the build server working. Obviously your experiences will be different to mine, and I don’t recommend that you follow this to the letter unless you have a similar set of solutions to build. I’m also going to assume you have Windows Server installed and your build service up and running, there are plenty of blogs and MSDN articles that show you how to set this up.

I’m very aware that using Write-Host cmdlet in PowerShell is generally frowned upon by PowerShell experts, mainly because it bypasses the pipeline, so it limits what you can do with that info. The reason I like to use it in my scripts is that generally I plan to write to the console in a variety of colours in order to convey the information and to highlight that there has been a change. If a cube is only partially processed it generally means that there is a partition within a measure group that is not processed, and when you have hundreds of partitions stored away it really can become a mammoth task to find out which one is unprocessed. So I have a script that searches all partitions with a status of unprocessed and write it to the screen in red-on-black writing. Little did I know that Write-Error existed that does the exact same thing!2013-03-21

Introduction

I’m a big fan of PowerShell and an even bigger fan of writing PowerShell modules which enable me to share my functions amongst the team and enable them to extend and augment these functions. In this article I am going to introduce extracting dacpacs through sqlpackage.exe, and how to create a nested module that contains a simple function to call a bat file which extracts the dacpac of a database via sqlpackage. This function will be aliased in order to reduce the number of keystrokes required to extract a dacpac.
2013-01-28

(There is a more up to date version of this script here)
Hey folks, and welcome to my first proper blog post. One of the things that I like to monitor through my daily checks in the file size and the free space of each file within the databases. During a busy loading period, some databases can grow massively, so it’s important to keep an eye on the growth. Through the UI, SSMS only gives us the size of the files and what the max size is that they can grow to, which is clearly not very useful. Fortunately, a quick query on the dbo.sysfiles of each databases that we want to monitor gives us some info:

but this isn’t entirely too useful. For starters the size is in KB. This makes sense as databases store data in 8kb sized files. Whilst it may be OK for a small database like this one, our data warehouses are far to big for us to find sizes in KB useful. Also, we can infer the remaining space, but again it’s not too helpful by having to figure this out for ourselves.